Blog – Isildur1 returns to the high stakes games

Thursday, 18 February 2010

If you have any sort of interest in the online poker world, then you’ll doubtless have heard – quite likely through Bluff Europe’s online news updates – that the young Swedish sensation known only as “Isildur1” has once again been making his presence felt at Full Tilt Poker since losing his $6m winnings in the last weeks of 2009.

While he hasn’t been taking on Ivey, Dwan and Antonius simultaneously at $500/$1,000 and creating million-dollar pots, he has made some serious dough. According to High Stakes DB, in 2010 Isildur1 has put in 15,000 hands and made $1,468,100 – a tidy winrate of just under $100 per hand. He is one of four players to have earned that much but has played a fraction of the hands – Gus Hansen, for example, is up $2.5m this year but over a significant sample of 55,000 hands in just six weeks.

So how is this going to go? Will history repeat itself?

Patrik Antonius predicted in a Full Tilt Poker podcast that Isildur1 would be around for a while. Tom “durrrr” Dwan, who took the brunt of Isildur1’s not inconsiderable NLHE skills last year, concurred with that sentiment.

Isildur1 is a seriously aggressive player who isn’t scared to push a slight edge with hundreds of thousands of dollars. His style is a successful one and he’s proven he can keep up with the big boys.

However, he is also a man of remarkable intelligence – anyone who competes at that dizzying level of online poker is. He will know his own flaws and those of his opponents this time around. Sure, it’s likely that he will make a few million then lose it all again but it’s significantly less likely now that it’s happened already.

In my opinion, we’ll see this screen name a lot in 2010. I’m looking forward to the matches against Dwan and Brian Hastings the most. There’s a lot of history there and it should make for some fantastic hands.